When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am? ~Azar Nafisi
The Letter Reimagined, Week Four: Letter To My Hometown
I was born in the city of Duluth on the North Shore of Lake Superior. It’s a place equal parts beautiful and badass, and the spirit of Duluth’s harsh geography deeply informs my 2021 memoir, The Part That Burns.
But Duluth has also loomed large in my narrative journalism work throughout my writing career, which began in the early 1990s. Here’s something I wrote about Duluth about 20 years ago, for a magazine cover story on that city’s pivot to tourism as a last resort after decades of decline:
Back in the summer of 1974, my mother was packing my sisters and me and the family dog into the old Impala for the move from Duluth to the wild west. My dad and his sister were simultaneously dumping my great aunt’s North Shore log home (with stone fireplace on a wooded lot near the Lester River) for a paltry $15,000. They were glad to be rid of it. And around that same time—an era of scarring economic hardship for the hilly city—another fed up Duluthian was paying for the installation of a billboard that begged: “Will the last person to leave Duluth please turn out the lights?” That dismal billboard might have been my final view of the city, as the Aerial Bridge and the gritty Duluth-Superior harbor disappeared behind the rising southbound slope of Interstate 35 at the Cody Street exit.
As a West End girl, my view of Duluth was necessarily impoverished. But my mother’s weekly drives along London Road to “look at the mansions” made it clear even to a child that somewhere along the line there had been real wealth in Duluth. In the late 1800s, when the timber, steel, shipping, and railroad industries that put Duluth on the map were in their full glory, Duluth boasted the highest concentration of millionaires per capita of any city in the country. The 1970s and 80s, however, saw brutal setbacks in the steel, mining, and timber industries, and as the economy bottomed out, Duluth’s high school graduates flocked away en masse and thrust the population into deep decline.
Here’s something else I wrote, from another cover story around that same time, about Lake Superior shipwreck diving:
When my son was very small, he was mesmerized by water and fire. Among his first words were “boat” and “candle.” By age four, he had developed a fierce interest in all manner of watercraft, disasters, and horrible combinations of the two—in particular, the sinking of the Titanic.
With my perhaps misguided support, my son’s fervor soon directed him to tragedies closer to home, and by the time he was five or six, he could do a crackerjack imitation of Fred Wolff, narrator of our worn-out copy of the cassette tape Stories of Lake Superior Shipwrecks, Volume I. Wolff, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, bears the sort of thick Minnesota accent you find only in the far north. On many a long drive during those sleep-deprived years, I relied on gas-station coffee to keep from being lulled blissfully to sleep at the wheel by the familiar drone of Wolff’s stories. My son, however, listened on the edge of his seat. What is it about shipwrecks that called so powerfully to this little boy? What is it about wrecks that pulls at him still, pulls at us all, in one way or another?
Right now, outside, late autumn rain and wind are ripping wet leaves from the trees in great batches, plastering them against the windshields of parked cars and onto the blackened city streets. Rivers of water rush down the gutters toward the sewer drains, begging to be dammed and diverted by schoolchildren in yellow slickers whose mothers watch anxiously from picture windows as October shudders to an end. It’s a nearly perfect backdrop for an enduring sea tale about a terrible witch and her legacy of destruction: the Witch of November, the scourge of our inland seas, who swallows ships whole, steals lives, and strands mourners helpless on the shore.
From the SS Edmund Fitzgerald (whose November 10, 1975 sinking was made famous the world over by Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad), to the twenty ships and 250 lives lost in the “Big Blow” of November 1913, to the tragic wreck of the Daniel J. Morrell on November 29, 1966, which killed all but one man, left shivering in his shorts and pea coat, the Great Lakes have claimed as many as ten thousand ships and more than thirty thousand lives since the wreck of LaSalle’s Griffon in 1679. Encrypted in the sodden debris of these disasters is the story of our lives, literal and metaphorical, and for that we keep coming back to search.
In both these excerpts, my body’s connection to Duluth seeps through the reportage. That’s because Duluth lives in me. It always will.
In Story Challenge Week Three, we talked about stories in relation to place—how stories could never enter the world, never come into being, without the doorway of place. And how once through that doorway, our stories then enter into a contract with place which states, in unequivocal terms, that place is neither atmosphere nor decoration, but, rather, an essential player in the unfolding drama.
The truth is, we very much understand ourselves in the context of place, which shapes us. In that sense, we can better understand ourselves and each other when we take an active curiosity in the ways in which place interacts with our sense of identity.
Timur Hammond, professor of cultural geography at Syracuse University, says:
I’m particularly interested in how meaning and culture intersects with the material landscapes of cities—especially its physical infrastructure, like buildings, freeways and parks. How do people’s memories and understandings of the past become embedded in these environments? …When we talk about place, we’re not only talking about individual experiences and perspectives, we’re also talking about time and history.
These are such rich, wonderful questions for writers to ponder! Indeed, these are crucial questions when it comes to our creative writing, regardless of genre.
Of hometowns in particular, Joyce Carol Oates said:
I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It's always something very specific.
Something interesting for us as writers to consider, when it comes to place, is that places have their own voices. The way a place sounds is called its "aural architecture" and it can significantly effect how we experience that place.
Craig Childs writes, in his essay, “Whispering Walls and the Nature of Acoustic Geography”:
The nascent field of “archaeoacoustics” studies the way sound and archaeological sites interact. I look at this as not just an ancient feature, but one that we walk through everyday. Cathedrals and capital domes have been noted for the way they capture and amplify sound. By happenstance or not, resonance is part of the way we relate to architecture, whether human made or carved by nature.
As usually seems the case, the poets have something to teach all of us when it comes to place. Consider this slender beauty by Agha Shahid Ali:
Postcard from Kashmir
Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches.
I always loved neatness. Now I hold
the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.
This is home. And this the closest
I’ll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won’t be so brilliant,
the Jhelum’s waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.
And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.
—Agha Shahid Ali
from The Half-Inch Himalayas, Wesleyan University Press, 1987
About this poem, and place poems in general, KC Trommer writes, in “Writing Poems of Place”:
Sometimes homelands fade in your consciousness, as Kashmir does for Ali, despite his writing about it often and trying to keep the memory of it crisp and alive in his verse. If a poem is to contain a place, it must recognize this fragility. When thinking about a known place, or a new place, or a place we have left or have had to leave, we need to consider all that we don’t know about it. In doing so, we find our way.
So, with this inspiration in hand, we’ll spend our last week of The Letter Reimagined attempting to find our way together toward the intersection of place and person with letters to our hometown.
I present you this week with a seven-part exercise for drafting a letter to your own hometown, along with a few crucial tips to make it real and alive … and a few more bonus examples of epistolary writing to take with you as we exit this fast, fun, four-week intensive. It has been such an honor to write with you this way.
To note: Next month, we’ll dive into our final seasonal intensive of the year, The Scene. Scenes are the essential building blocks of all narrative forms of storytelling, including fiction and memoir. The ability to write a solid scene—with confidence—will transform your writing for the better. If you are already a paid member, you’re all set, if not, you can upgrade to join.